Finished the Afghan

I finished the afghan I'm giving my mom for Christmas. It's pretty huge. Which was deliberate -- I wanted it to work as a throw on her bed, and not just a lap-blanket sort of thing -- but still, I was kind of O_O when I spread it across our king size bed to take pics.

This is looking up from the foot of the bed. Note a copy of Charles's Adventures of an Arkansawyer on my nightstand. :)

A closeup showing the pattern. It's a basic feather-and-fan that I worked out on a paper towel, fiddling and swatching and fiddling and swatching till I had something I liked. One thing I noticed is that if you do a F&F pattern with a stockinette ground, which is how you usually see it, the rippled edges will curl up, which looks like a mistake. :/ I experimented a bit and found that if you knit that edge with a garter stitch ground, it lays flat, so the first few inches and last few inches of the afghan are in garter stitch, which you can see more clearly below. The texture is a bit odd, but I'll take that in exchange for an edge that lays nicely flat.

This took me about six weeks or so to do. I've been knitting while I watch Netflix on my computer, and I've been watching a lot of Netflix. :)

Angie

Why Amazon Is Taking Over the World

So I finished my first square for the World's Biggest Christmas Stocking. It was fun, and when I finished I wanted to make another one. So I picked a new pattern and ordered yarn for it from Yarnspirations, the company that's donating some money to a charity whenever you buy a skein of yarn from them. That was the seventeenth.

It's now the twenty-second and my package still hasn't arrived.

I got a note from the company with a tracking number. Okay, cool, let's see where my box is.

I poke around a bit, and first thing I see is that it takes them at least two business days to just pack your box and get it out of the warehouse. Umm, okay. Two days after I order something from Amazon, it shows up at my doorstep about 90% of the time, and that's without expedited shipping. (And that's just two days, not two business days, unless the second day is a Sunday, and sometimes even then.) But okay, I live in Seattle; I'll bet not everyone gets service that fast from Amazon, and I don't know where Yarnspirations is shipping from.

I go looking for their tracking system. Clicking on the tracking number in the e-mail takes me to a general page where they're trying to sell me a bunch of stuff. Down in a lower corner is a big red button that says "View Order History." Okay, would've been nice to go there straight from the tracking number, but whatever. I click on the big red button.

I've ordered from them twice, and there's a line item for each one. The order from the seventeenth is on top, and... it says "Complete."

Funny, I don't consider that order complete, seeing as how I don't have it in my hands yet.

I click on "View" to, presumably, get more info about this order. I get my name and address, and what I ordered, what it cost, payment method, that sort of thing. Under "Shipping Method" it says "Shipping Option - US Standard Shipping." Wow, that's incredibly generic. USPS? UPS? FedEx? Ralph's Tricycle Fleet...? Anything? No clue. There's a tracking number with no-kidding twenty-two digits in it, but it's not clickable. And since I don't know which company they gave my box to, I can't try plugging that huge number into anyone else's tracking system either.

Oh, but there's a button to one side that says "Track This Shipment." Cool, that must be what I want, so I click on it.

It says:

Shipment #100024731
GM-SPE: 9261293250801316909589

and nothing else, with two "Close Window" buttons, one above and one below. That's the order number, which was on my e-mail, and the tracking number I got on the previous page, which makes this tracking page perfectly un-helpful.

And that's about it. Short of putting in some kind of help ticket, I have no way of getting any more info. I'm hoping that by the time they'd have gotten back to me, I'll have my package. [crossed fingers] Tomorrow, maybe? The seventeenth and twentieth are two business days during which they hopefully got my yarn packed, and tomorrow is the twenty-third, which would give three days for actual transit. I don't remember how long the first one took to arrive, so I can't make a comparison there.

Maybe it's my fault. I haven't done any knitting in at least half a dozen years or so, and starting up again has re-kindled my enthusiasm for it. I did most of my knitting while sitting here watching Netflix on my computer. It took me about ten days to knit my square, and apparently it only takes ten days to burn in that habit; it now feels weird sitting here watching TV online without something to do with my hands. That makes me a little more eager than I was before.

But still, seriously, if it gets here tomorrow, it will have been almost a week. And their order tracking system doesn't deserve the name; it just ticked me off. If Amazon does end up taking over the retail world, as so many hysterics keep screaming will happen, this will be why -- faster, superior service.

I for one will welcome our Amazonian overlords. I wish they'd take over this yarn vendor and whip them into shape.

Angie, listening with annoyed impatience for a knock on the door

World's Biggest Christmas Stocking

If you knit or crochet, or are willing to learn, this is an incredibly cool project for a great charity.

The Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation helps kids who've lost a military parent in the line of duty pay for college. Caron, the yarn manufacturer, is putting together a project to make the world's biggest Christmas stocking, and is asking people to knit or crochet three-foot squares and send them in to be assembled. They're going for an entry in the Guinness Book, which is also cool.

If you buy your yarn from Caron, they'll give fifteen cents per skein to the CFPF. If you just want to participate in the world's-biggest-Christmas-stocking project, you can buy your yarn from someone else, or use yarn from your stash, so long as it's worsted weight. There are knit patterns and crochet patterns you can download and print out. All the crochet patterns are Beginner or Easy, and the knitting patterns are mostly Beginner or Easy, with a couple of Intermediates that use mosaic colorwork. Even if you're just learning, you can find a pattern that'll work for you. It might take a while to do a three-by-three square, but if you use a Beginner level pattern, it won't be hard. If you have a favorite pattern you want to use instead, you can do that, so long as you end up with a three-by-three foot square.

If you're worried that you'll be too slow, note that they've been working on this since last November, as far as I can tell. They planned for it to go into this year, and sure enough, they're only 20% through right now. Looks like there'll be time for fast workers to do several squares if they want, and for beginners or people who are just busy to do one without knocking themselves out. :)

The main page, with a progress meter, is here.